Creating gods

By Aaron Zhao

At the top of the headquarters of Stedroid Intelligence in the year 2188, there was a meeting room. A meeting room so large, so impressive and overwhelming that it could make even the most confident people feel small. There was a long table that stretched across the whole room, enough for almost a hundred people. On one side of the room was the company's logo, emblazoned across the silvery wall; on the other side was a holographic projector so large it felt like it took up half the room.

On the left side of the room sat the architects, engineers, and investors of the GodAI project. The architects sat at the front, each with their laptop open, working on projects that a normal human couldn't comprehend. Behind them sat the engineers, the brilliant minds who had spent their whole lives dedicated to working at Stedroid, their sleepless yet still sharp eyes on the other side of the room. Behind them stood the investors, board members, and anyone else involved in the project, all of them with nervous, quiet smiles and a kind of patience that really was just hunger.

On the right side of the room sat the ethics committee, a much smaller group of individuals who were fewer in number, but each held a more heavy presence in the meeting. At the front sat their leader, Chairman Rouxls Sato.

“You’re asking for authorization to publish and proceed to trials for an implant chip?” said Sato in a steady voice.

“Yes, it's not a chip, it's THE chip.” Said Dr. Rory Night, the lead engineer of Project GodAI. “A super AI brainchip that can seamlessly be integrated into a person's brain on a cellular level.”

Sato’s gaze didn’t move. “An implant in someone’s head.”

Night leaned forward. “It’s not-”

“It is,” she cut in. “Tell me what it does, tell me everything.”

Night inhaled. “GodAI interfaces at the cellular level,” he said. “It can modulate neural firing, it can regulate endocrine output, hormones, stress response, and inflammation. It can maintain homeostasis with a precision the body never evolved to manage.”

Night kept on going. “It can reverse senescence markers and mitochondrial decay. The chip can direct cellular repair pathways and suppress maladaptive replication. In practice-”

“So, in practice,” Sato repeated, “we can reverse the aging process, and a person might live forever.”

The heated discussion was not a sudden eruption but a slow, unstoppable rising tide. Various engineers and architects spoke rapidly about the benefits of the chip: medicine, trauma recovery, dementia reversal, saving minds from decline. Investors spoke about the inevitability of competitors, geopolitics, and the danger of being left behind. The ethics committee answered with the vocabulary that had been used time and time again that would always stay relevant: consent, inequity, and the moral problem of power that can’t be controlled.

As the hours passed, everyone’s voices grew raw. No one yielded. There were too many futures in the balance, and each side saw the other as blind; no conclusion could be formed, no compromise survived more than a few minutes.

Finally, at the far end of the room, the door opened without warning. He walked in slowly, but each step held power. It was Dr. Frisk Kong; he was smaller than the legends about him said, but his presence reshaped the room anyway. Loose white hair fell at his sides, his face was plastered with wrinkles, but his eyes remained sharp, piercing, and he carried the spirit of someone still in their prime.

Engineers, architects, investors, ethics committee members—everyone stood up.

Frisk raised one hand. “Sit,” he said, and they did.

He turned to the ethics committee, “You argue that GodAI is not a tool but a governor. Its ability to control the brain at cellular level introduces an existential risk: inequality, permanent domination, the end of the human era. You argue that immortality without accountability is tyranny.”

Frisk paused. Then he turned to the other side of the table.

“For a long time,” he said, “I believed our duty was to build what can be built, and then chase the consequences with laws and pledges. I understand the hunger at this table. I understand the fear.”

“It would be easy,” Frisk continued, “to approve this. To declare that progress demands courage. That the world will do it anyway. That Sterdroid must lead.”

Somewhere, someone let out a hopeful exhale.

Frisk’s voice hardened, not louder, simply denser. “However,” he said, “we are not gods, and we cannot create gods.”

The sentence struck everyone in the room like a bullet. Before anyone could respond, Frisk lifted his hand and hit it once on the table. The sound was small, and yet it ended the hearing.

“Project GodAI is terminated,” he said, “Effective immediately. All related research is to be wiped: models, data, prototypes, and fabrication notes. All brain-implant work stops. Sterdroid AI research reverts to what it was always meant to be: tools that help humans, not tools implanted inside humans.”

“No-” Night began, his voice breaking, tears forming at the edge of his sleepless eyes.

An investor in the back, face flushed, said. “You can’t; this is-”

“I can,” Frisk said, and the simplicity of it was terrifying.

For a moment, no one moved, as if the air had thickened into glass. Then the shock rippled through the engineers: pale faces, clenched fists, eyes wide with a grief that looked like betrayal. The investor’s anger was more contained: tight smiles, muttered legal words, mental calculations rearranging the shape of their futures.

Across the table, the ethics committee did not cheer. They didn’t need to. Tears pooled in Sato’s eyes, and when she blinked them back, her shoulders shook once. Relief, victory, sorrow, all at once.

Frisk stood, and the room stood with him, compelled by reflex. He looked at them as if he were looking at a younger version of himself and didn’t like what he remembered.

“We do not create gods,” he announced again, louder this time.

Then he turned and walked out the door.

In the corridor beyond, where the hearing room’s microphones could not reach, Frisk’s face softened, not into kindness, but into something private and coldly amused.

Quietly, to no one, he spoke.

“Why create other gods,” he murmured, “if I am the only god?”

He lifted a hand to his temple, almost absentmindedly, as if brushing away an itch. For a fraction of a second, beneath the thin skin at his hairline, something shifted, an almost unseeable shimmer. His pupils tightened, then relaxed, and his posture straightened with a youth his body should no longer have had.

Down the hall, his reflection in the glass did not look old; it looked refined. Behind him, inside the hearing room, everyone was still arguing about what had been destroyed.

Ahead of him, Frisk walked without hurry, as if time had finally agreed to stop chasing him.